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Trump’s Dire Assessment of African American Communities Continues To Be Wrong

Donald Trump continued his appeal to African American today on Twitter. Or, if you believe the theory I proposed yesterday, Donald Trump continued his appeal to white voters to make them think that he isn’t racist. In any case, he brought up three statistics that he claimed were getting much worse for African Americans. Let’s dig in.

Yesterday on Twitter Donald Trump said “So many in the African-American community are doing so badly, poverty and crime way up, employment and jobs way down: I will fix it, promise.” Are poverty and crime up among African Americans and employment down?

According to the wonderfully graph heavy website Black Demographics, poverty among African Americans is down slightly from a high in 2010. While the current rate of 22.9% of Africans Americans living in poverty is up from a low of 19.3% in 2001, it is down from the rate of 24.1% in 2010 and well below the 29.3% of the early 1990s. So no, poverty is not “way up” among African Americans.

Despite the doom and gloom of Donald Trump, crime rates in America are way down, and black homicides are no exception. Drug arrests are down too.

So what about employment and jobs? Surely one of the “facts” that Trump tweeted out was actually true. Unemployment among African Americans is also down. A recent estimate puts black unemployment at around 8.8% in March, falling by nearly in half since 2011.